“We can end the acute phase of the pandemic this year, we can end Covid-19, as a global health emergency,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
But he warned of “the danger of assuming that the Omicron mutant will be the last mutated or that the pandemic is over”, because the conditions are currently “ideal” in the world for the emergence of new mutants of the virus, including those that are fast-spreading and more harmful.
He added, at the opening of the Executive Committee of the World Health Organization in Geneva, that in order to end the acute phase of the outbreak of the pandemic, countries should not stand idly by, but rather fight inequality in the distribution of vaccines, monitor the spread of the virus and its variants, and take the necessary measures to limit its spread.
For weeks, the Director of Global Health called on member states to speed up the distribution of vaccines in low-income countries, with the aim of reaching the goal of vaccinating 70% of the population of each country by the middle of 2022.
About 97 of the 194 member states of the World Health Organization have failed to achieve vaccination coverage that includes 40% of their population by the end of 2021, according to the World Health Organization.
And infection with the “Covid-19” disease, which is caused by the Corona virus, last week caused the death of a person every 12 seconds, and 100 cases of the disease were recorded every three seconds, according to Tedros.
The number of Covid-19 infections has increased the fastest in the world since the emergence of the “worrying” mutant Omicron, with more than 80 million infections recorded since then.
The Director of the World Health Organization stressed that “so far, the boom in new infections with Covid-19 has not been followed by a surge in deaths, even if the latter is increasing in all regions, especially in Africa, which is the region with the least access to vaccines against” Covid-19 disease.
He explained, “It is true that we will live with Covid for the foreseeable future (…), but learning to live with Covid should not mean that we have to make room for it. This should not mean that we have to accept that about 50,000 people die every week from disease. We can avoid it and treat it.”
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